Immigrants in Icelandic Society

Introduction

The idea of citizenship education has long been of considerable interest to scholars around the world. Generally speaking, any country that can be characterized as at least moderately multicultural has had a moment in its history when the concepts of interracial, religious, and ethnic equality have become crucial for its further social and political development. In such conditions, the phenomenon of citizenship education always acquires a literary dual nature. On the one hand, it can be considered as education for the citizens of every particular country. On the other hand, national and racial minorities in this country should also have the right to education.

Thus, citizenship education becomes controversial in its nature under the circumstances when certain groups of people are not recognized as citizens. Although observed in Iceland to a far lesser extent than in such countries as the USA, this controversial nature of citizenship education is still considerably important for the Icelandic society and integration of immigrants into it.

Theoretical Chapter

Literature Review

General notions

Needless to say, scholars around the world have paid much attention to the topic of citizenship education. In general terms, this topic has been examined and discussed as both a social phenomenon and as a political concept that hinders the development of society, especially in the modern globalized world. In more detail, some scholars discuss the issues associated with inefficient citizenship education and stress the importance of inclusive and totally equal educational opportunities for all social groups in a country. Other scholars, already admitting the fact that citizenship education is in its essence the acceptance of equality of people, analyze the pros and cons of this type of education and scrutinize the effects it has on the integration of immigrants into societies of such countries as the USA, Germany, England, France, and Iceland among others.

Problems of citizenship education

Thus, Wolf (2004) start the consideration of the topic of citizenship education for immigrants by noting that in such countries as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the practices of segregation of native-born and immigrant children in schools is still observed, although these countries adopt the values of human equality (pp. 71, 232). At the same time, the USA, Germany, and France, according to Wolf (2004) develop their citizenship education in a more immigrant-friendly manner and provide immigrant children with additional language learning opportunities that include language study classes and other developmental initiatives (pp. 223, 254). Such a controversial situation allows arguing that although the value of human equality acquires more popularity, there are still obstacles observed on the way of development of a social unum argued about by Banks (2007, pp. 7 – 8).

Multicultural democracy

Further on, the idea of multicultural unity in any society characterized by the joint existence of numerous racial and religious groups of people is developed by Osler (2005) through examples of Great Britain. Arguing that a “multicultural society must both nurture diversity and foster a common sense of belonging and a shared identity among its members” (p. 9), Osler (2005) continues by developing her “vision of Britain as a multicultural democracy” (p. 14) and supports this idea by the fact that the UK develops the system of eliminating the school segregation, still observed in historically controversial regions as Northern Ireland. Among the means this system uses is the development of the ideals promoted by the Global Education Consensus Panel created by the Center for Multicultural Education, i. e. unity and diversity, overall inclusion and participation, globalization, and intercultural awareness (Osler, 2005, pp. 19 – 20).

Excessively equal treatment of all students

At the same time, Noddings (2005) touches upon a seemingly opposite, but still equally important, issue of overemphasized equality of people belonging to different social, racial, or religious groups in class. In particular, Noddings (2005) points out that “too often, official curricula treat all students as if they were white, middle-class, natural-born citizens” (p. 75), which makes immigrants from, for example, China, Mexico, or other countries of Asia, Latin and Central America, feel uncomfortable and discriminated.

In more detail, the students that have the right to citizenship education in the UK or the USA feel that their racial belongings, similar to cultural and linguistic backgrounds, are ignored, and this fact complicates the already problematic way of their integration into the local community. The leitmotif of Noddings’ (2005, p. 79) argument in this respect is that citizenship education should not violate the rights of students for racial or ethnic identity, as the latter does not confront the notion of citizenship and both can be successfully developed simultaneously.

Similarly, the average curricula in the USA, as Noddings (2005) notes, ignore the income levels of their students. It is a widely observed condition that immigrants need time to adjust to the new society, and this adjustment is often associated with considerable financial difficulties. Accordingly, immigrant students may experience a problem with funding their study to the fullest extent, buying books and other educational resources. The curricula that treat all students equally in this respect also contribute to the difficulties immigrants experience in the process of social integration, and Noddings (2005) stresses the need to adjust curricula to diverse needs of students instead of making the latter adjust to such “uniform” educational requirements as discussed above (pp. 76 – 77).

Authentic unum

Accordingly, Banks (2007) seems to synthesize all issues observed in the area of citizenship education with the potential for the proper development of this sphere of social life. The idea of constructing “an authentic unum” (p. 4) is central to Banks’ (2007) work, and the first thing he addresses in trying to explore this idea is the definition and historical roots of citizenship education. Thus, Banks (2007) sticks to the point that the very phenomenon of citizenship education was invented and developed by “powerful and mainstream groups” (p. 4) of the society and was destined to serve their needs before all other values.

Drawing from this, the already mentioned idea of unum in the society has this historically discriminatory character of citizenship education as its main obstacle. To overcome it, Banks (2007) suggests two major strategies to be used by the government and by every particular citizen. The first one is to widen the meaning of “We the people” idea of the U.S. Constitution to actually include all people, not just the dominant white race that controls the basics of social development. The second strategy is to teach intercultural awareness and tolerance at all levels of education. Both these strategies combined, as Banks (2007, p. 5) sees them, will allow developing the effective citizenship education for the good of the whole society, whether it is the U.S. society or the society in any other country, or the whole world.

Immigrant citizenship education in Iceland

At the same time, the sources by the Icelandic government and UNESCO seem to claim the absolutely proper way of citizenship education for immigrants in this country. For instance, Stefna (2007) and Gunnlaugsdottir (2008) argue that Iceland tries to avoid the mistakes that Noddings (2005) notes in the U.S. education for immigrants. In other words, Icelandic governmental policies are aimed at protecting diversity in citizenship education (Stefna, 2007, pp. 3 – 4). Thus, although Icelandic is the language of communication in the country and all immigrants have to take courses in this language, the government ensures the immigrants’ right to maintain their national languages as long as possible (Stefna, 2007, p. 4; Gunnlaugsdottir, 2008, p. 2).

Accordingly, the experts from UNESCO (2008) also notice the substantial success of Iceland in the so-called “inclusive education”, or education for all. This success is expressed in compulsory instruction in the Icelandic language which, however, can often be used as a second language; this way, schools in Iceland try to moderate the pressure of learning a new language for immigrants of all levels, but at the same time to ensure the steady growth of immigrants’ knowledge of Icelandic (UNESCO, 2008, pp. 4 – 5).

Summary and research relevance

Thus, the above-presented review of literature on citizenship education for immigrants, as exemplified by situations observed in various countries of the world, allows making major conclusions. First, the topic of immigrant education and integration into society has been quite widely studied by reputable scholars, and this fact allows forming preliminary perceptions of the development observed in this topic. Second, the ideas expressed by scholars regarding the topic of immigrant education are often controversial and require further verification. Further on, citizenship education for immigrants specifically in Iceland has not been studied enough to make any serious conclusions, and the current research aims at eliminating this gap.

Research Questions and Objectives

Accordingly, the objectives and questions of the current research are derived from the tasks outline for it by the literature review. In particular, trying to enrich the knowledge regarding citizenship education for immigrants in Iceland, the present research will require more information on the topic, and preferably this information should come from the direct participants of the mentioned educational process, i. e. immigrants living in Iceland. Therefore, the more precise list of the objectives set for the current research includes the following items:

1. Examine the process of integration of immigrants into Icelandic society;
2. Study the conditions of development of citizenship education for immigrants in Iceland;
3. Consider the overall picture of immigrants’ lives in Icelandic society;
4. Apply the theoretical concepts and ideas retrieved from the works by reputable scholars to the findings of the research;
5. Make a comprehensive analysis of levels of immigrant education in Iceland in the context of theory and practical examples of other countries.

In order to achieve the above listed objectives, the following set of research questions should be answered with the help of data collection and analysis methodologies discussed further (see Research Methodology section):

1. What is the state of development of immigrants’ citizenship education in Iceland?
2. Do immigrants have educational opportunities equal to native citizens?
3. How is this equality/inequality expressed in Icelandic educational system?
4. Can immigrants in Iceland integrate into the local society and still maintain their national and ethnic identity?
5. How are customs and tradition of immigrants preserved, if at all, in the new society they come to, i. e. in Iceland?
6. Is it possible to exercise immigrants’ original customs and tradition and be considered a citizen in Iceland?
7. Do family relations and roles change for immigrants when they integrate to Icelandic society?

Thus, it is expected that the above listed questions will be answered using the further discussed methodology that includes data collection and analysis strategies, as well as the considerations of confidentiality and privacy.

Research Methodology

Data Collection Method

General notions

The basic method for data collection employed by the current research is a semi-structured interview that adopts the notions of both open ended and structured interviews with established sets of close-ended questions. The major advantage of such a combined approach to the interview is the option of changing the questions and the focus of the whole discussion in progress, depending on the answers obtained and perceived reactions of the interviewee (Mason, 2002, pp. 156 – 157). For putting this advantage into practice, the interview used for the purposes of this research possesses the four main qualities that Mason (2002, p. 91) considers to be basic:

1. The interview presupposes and encourages interaction of the interviewee with the interviewer;
2. The interview takes place in the informal context, which facilitates objectivity of answers and reactions of the interviewee;
3. The interview focuses on the limited and succinct number of themes derived from the main topic of the research;
4. The interview depends on the situated knowledge of the interviewee, i. e. the latter’s ability to use his/her knowledge in particular contexts presented by the interviewer.

In more detail, the above listed qualities are developed in the interview used during the research to achieve the major goal of this interview, as well as any interview carried out in social studies, i. e. to find out actual perceptions, ideas, thoughts, and attitudes of the interviewee instead of obtaining academic answers conditioned by the formal setting rather than actual state of things. The basic characteristics of the interview used include active discussion and listening, flexibility and rephrasing of questions, encouragement of topic development, and absence of any negative reactions to ignorance expressed by the interviewee (Mason, 2002, p. 211).

Interview design

More specifically, the design of the used interview includes the set of five question blocks, each containing a potentially varied number of questions. These blocks are titled in respect of the major focus areas of the interview and the whole research:

1. General notions;
2. Family and roles;
3. Education;
4. Traditions;
5. Expectations and aspirations.

The examples of the questions contained in any of the question blocks are presented above, each portion under a respective subheading that marks the beginning of a new block:

General notions:

• What is the country of your origin? Please describe your life in that country.
• When have you come to Iceland? Please describe your first experiences regarding the process of integration into Icelandic society.

Family and roles:

• Please describe your family, its composition, and any peculiarities you consider to be worth noting. How many people are there in your family?
• Are roles distributed in your family and/or community? If yes, how? If not, why?

Education:

• Have you taken up citizenship education in Iceland?
• If yes, please describe your experiences regarding citizenship education in this country. If not, please provide your motivations for doing so.

Traditions:

• Do you and/or your family have any traditions and customs that explicitly manifest your belonging to your racial or ethnic group?
• Were there any cases of misunderstandings caused by your customs and traditions during your stay in Iceland? Please provide any detail you consider to be relevant.

Expectations and aspirations:

• What made you move to Iceland? Please describe any motivations you have had for coming to live to this country.
• What have you expected from moving to Iceland? How can you assess the conformity of actual picture to your expectations using a 5-point scale (where 1 means that everything is different from what you expected, while 5 marks the perfect match of expectations and results)?

Thus, the above presented examples of questions used during the interview are expected to provoke a free discussion, in which the interviewee will be encouraged to provide as much data as he/she wants and can. Inability to answer any question will be accepted as a normal state of things.

Interview process

In more detail, the interview process is expected to include four basic stages that should provide for the most objective data retrieved from the research. These stages are:

1. Preparation of the interview;
2. Beginning of the interview;
3. Interview as such;
4. Analysis of results and making conclusions.

More specifically, stage I will be focused on two main processes, i. e. the preparation of interview questions and the selection of an interviewee. The questions are prepared on the basis of the data obtained from the literature review and in regard to the research topic, questions and objectives (examples of the questions can be seen in Interview design subsection). The interviewee is selected using a structured selection method with special attention paid to the interviewee’s immigrant status, educational record, and the relative degree of integration into Icelandic society. The perfect candidate is a person whose parents immigrated to Iceland when he/she was up to 3 years old, which was the reason for this person to go through all stages of Icelandic citizenship education for immigrants.

As soon as the preparation stage is completed, the interview begins in the manner advocated by Mason (2002, p. 78). In more detail, the interviewer creates the comfortable atmosphere for the interviewee and tries to establish the contact with him/her. To facilitate the process, the purpose and the design of the interview are explained to the interviewee together with confidentiality concerns (see Confidentiality and Privacy section). Only after a willing consent of the interviewee is obtained, the semi-structured interview can commence.

The interview, i. e. stage III, takes place in an informal manner, and the questions are changed in accordance with the interviewee’s answers. The point of the interview is to find out as much as possible of what the interviewee knows about the research topic, rather than to try to find out something specific which the interviewee might be unfamiliar with. Finally, after the interview is completed, the results for each question block are analyzed and synthesized to provide answers to research questions.

Data Analysis Strategy

Accordingly, after the data are collected through the interview, the analysis strategy comes into play as a way to transform the raw data into answers to the research questions and/or implications for further studies. So, the data analysis strategy used for this research is the process of considering and discussing the interview findings in the context of theories and ideas presented in the Literature Review section. In simpler terms, the findings of this particular interview will be contrasted against opinions of reputable scholars, and such an approach is expected to provide objective data (although only for the particular case of the interviewee) regarding the development of immigrant citizenship education in Iceland.

Among the points of particular interest during the data analysis will be such ones as the overall picture of immigrant citizenship education in Iceland, issues observed in this area of education, the ways to cope with those issues; at the same time, the data analysis is expected to reveal any advantages that immigrant citizenship education in Iceland has if compared to other countries. Drawing from this, if such advantages are found out, the researcher will be able to recommend problem solutions to countries where immigrant education requires improvements.

Finally, on the basis of the findings analyzed through the described strategy, the researcher will be able to answer the research questions and achieve the objectives of the current study, i. e. examine the immigrant citizenship education in Iceland. The data analysis strategy will allows formulating the conclusions for the current paper. The directions for potential further studies in the same area will also be formulated with the help of analyzed interview findings.

Confidentiality and Privacy

The discussed interview will be carried out with the proper attention paid to the concepts of confidentiality and privacy. Every person has the right for privacy, and the interviewee selected for participation in the current research is not an exception. Accordingly, the interviewer guarantees the absolute confidentiality and respect to the privacy of the interviewed person. This guarantee is supported by the agreement both parties, i. e. the researcher and the interviewee sign, in which the researcher is legally liable for violating the privacy of the interviewee. Based on such a strict conformance to the confidentiality regulations, none of private data of the interviewee (name, exact residential address, exact employment data, appearance features, photos, etc.) will be revealed in this paper as well as in any other paper that might follow it and use its findings.

Interviewed Person’s Background

Physical Data and Origin

Accordingly, considering the constraints of confidentiality and privacy, all the data that can be disclosed about the interviewee selected for the current research are presented in this section. So, the interviewee is a white male in perfect physical and mental health conditions (which is important for ensuring that the interviewee can perceive and understand questions properly and react to them in a natural way). The country of origin is of the interviewee is Romania, although his parents came to that country from Hungary about 20 years before his birth.

Age and Income Status

The interviewee is a 32 years old person, currently employed by one of the public organizations in Iceland. The educational background of the interviewee was one of the basic criteria for his selection as far as he went through all four stages of Icelandic education including pre-school, compulsory, upper-secondary, and higher -education. The interviewee belongs to a middle-income social group, which conditions his desire for further career development and improvement of living conditions.

Life in Iceland

The interviewee has been living in Iceland for almost 30 years already as far as his parents immigrated to this country from Romania when the interviewee was 2 years old. Since that time, the interviewee has obviously mastered the Icelandic language, which helped him succeed in educational and employment initiatives. The interviewee is married to a female of Icelandic origin and has two children both in Iceland. Currently, the interviewee considers himself to be properly integrated to the Icelandic society to a great extent, but the way towards this integration is one of the questions that the interview is set to describe in detail.

Interview Findings

General Notions

Thus, using the above discussed semi-structured interview, the researcher has managed to retrieve the following findings. Regarding the question block titled General Notions, the findings proved to be not surprising and rather expectable. In particular, the interviewee reported that the country of his origin was Romania, which the researcher had already known from the interviewee’s background. At the same time, when asked about the experiences of living in Romania, the interviewee could provide any reasonable details because he was only 2 years old when his parents moved out of the country and immigrated to Iceland. So, the potentially valuable data regarding the educational system of the interviewee’s country of origin as viewed by the interviewee himself could not be obtained through this interview.

However, the interviewee provided rather numerous details of his first experiences of living in Iceland and integrating into the local society. In particular, the interviewee noticed the almost complete lack of any discrimination towards him or his parents in daily-life situations like shopping, employment, and communication with people. The first step of his integration into Icelandic society was the study at the pre-school level, which he started at 4 years and finished at 6. Not going into many details in this question block, the interviewee characterized the environment he lived in as a rather friendly one.

Social integration that took place out of school, i. e. making friends and establishing relationships, was also characterized as non-problematic. The interviewee argued that it became possible due to the proper knowledge of the Icelandic language that he started learning from the time he came to Iceland with his family.

Family and Roles

Answering the second question block titled Family and Roles, the interviewee managed to provide much more information regarding both his current life and family in Iceland and the ideas associated with family in Romania that his parents rendered to him. In more detail, the interviewee characterized his own family as a proper embodiment of what he dreamt of some years ago. Having a wife and two children, a boy and a girl, and taking care for them, was, according to the interview, the major goal of his life. The peculiarity of his family that the interviewee was willing to notice was the fact that there were literary no quarrels in it, and he attributed this fact to the need of being together that all immigrants experienced from time to time (although in Iceland there are no conditions that would make immigrants look for help or support).

At the same time, when the interviewee was asked to elaborate on role distribution in his family as well as in his original Romanian society, he could not but notice numerous similarities between the two environments. To put it briefly, in that society, as well as in his family, the interviewee noticed the dominant role of the elderly people, to who younger people display respect and help in all possible ways. Additionally, children are perceived as the basic social value, but they are still encouraged to help the grown-ups doing easy housework tasks. Therefore, the interviewee noticed a clear hierarchy of roles in the Romanian family and society, but argued that this hierarchy had literary nothing to do with a discrimination of any kind.

Education

Thus, the interview approached the topic of education, i. e. its major focus area. Luckily, the interviewee managed to provide quite a large amount of data on this topic. Particularly, answering the initial questions of Education block, the interviewee admitted that he had taken up citizenship education in Iceland. Though being an immigrant child, he felt no sings of discrimination in a citizenship class. This might be the result of his proper knowledge of Icelandic, and the interviewee expressed doubts about the similarly easy citizenship study for a person with little or no knowledge of this language. However, having no grounds to state that language mastery was a reason of discrimination, or its absence, the interviewee hurried to assure that it was only his assumption.

Furthermore, going into details of his educational experiences in Iceland the interviewee reported that he felt the help that teachers tried to provide for him as an immigrant that might have experienced study problems in Iceland. In particular, the interviewee enjoyed the chance to take up additional Icelandic language classes and could always address teachers for help in any questions regarding social integration. Interestingly, the interviewee noticed that every student in the school or university he studied at was treated individually. To put it simply, no one was forced to take up expenses he/she could not take or adjust to things that contradicted their national, racial, or religious values. Accordingly, the interviewee generally assessed his educational experiences in Iceland as positive and encouraging, and also remarked that he attributed quite a high value to this fact in the whole process of his further career development and personal life.

Traditions

Moreover, the information that the interviewee provided while answering the Traditions question block proved to be rather useful and thought provoking as well. In particular, when asked about any customs or traditions exercised by him or his family and that would manifest explicitly their belonging to Romanian people, the interviewee could not name any significant tradition that would be different from the ones that are common in Iceland. These include religious and other customs and traditions that are quite similar in the majority of European countries. The only thing that could manifest the interviewee’s belonging to the Romanians is the fact that the Romanian language was spoken in the family from time to time instead of Icelandic.

However, since this took place predominantly within the family, the interviewee could not recall any instances when the exercise of Romanian customs and traditions caused misunderstandings between him and native-born Icelanders. Interestingly, not even being asked about such a point, the interviewee assumed that there would not be any problems if they manifested their Romanian origin in public in any way because Icelandic society, as the interviewee perceived it as a rather tolerant and democratic one. On the whole, the discussion in this question block transformed into listing the advantages of Icelandic society instead of expected being a recollection of negative experiences associated with the interviewee’s being an immigrant. One more interesting finding from this question block is that, according to the interviewee, Icelanders are rather friendly to immigrants and even try to learn their identities, customs, and traditions. Generally, Icelandic society seems to welcome immigrants and manifest any kind of support for the latter to integrate into the local community.

Expectations and Aspirations

Finally, the findings of Expectations and Aspirations question block allowed understanding the motivation for the interviewee and his family to move to Iceland, as well as the level of matching between what they had expected to see in this country and what they actually saw. First, the interviewee could not provide any personal motivations to immigrate to Iceland as he was too young to have ones when his parents decided to leave Romania. What he managed to recollect is the memories of his parents, who were dissatisfied with the political regime and standards of living in Romania at the time they decided to immigrate. Therefore, the interviewee assumed that the major motivation for immigration had been the desire to find better living in Iceland.

And, as the interviewee claimed, the family found what it had been looking for in this country. When asked to assess the level of conformity of the picture of living in Iceland to the expected standards, the interviewee did not think too much and attributed 5 to this conformity, i. e. the highest level of expectations’ matching, and even joked that he would have given 6 to this country if possible, because in some aspects it even exceeded the expectation of his parents. The answer to the final questions of this block allowed seeing that the interviewee’s level of satisfaction with his integration to Icelandic society was quite high, and he could not mention any significant problem, either associated with his being an immigrant or of other nature, that could change this attitude.

Discussion

Thus, the above presented findings allows contrasting the views of reputable scholars regarding citizenship education or immigrants with the ideas expressed by a direct participant of such educational process, i. e. a Romanian immigrant in Iceland, who was interviewed for the purposes of the current research. First, the problem of segregation of natives and immigrants in some educational establishment of Europe and the USA, as noted by Wolf (2004), does not concern Iceland, according to the interview findings. On the contrary, the situation reported by a person educated in Iceland is more likely to be called the multicultural democracy advocated by Osler (2005), as far as representatives of various cultures and races have equal rights and opportunities in Iceland.

Second, the interview findings do not allow arguing about the excessively equal treatment of all students irrespective of their individual peculiarities. Noddings (2005) argues that such a phenomenon is observed in certain U.S. schools, but the current research did not find evidence of such cases in Iceland. This fact allows assuming that Iceland is on the proper way to building the authentic unum argued about by Banks (2007) and supported by the data reported by Stefna (2007), UNESCO (2008), and Gunnlaugsdottir (2008). To put it simpler, the findings of the above discussed interview allow arguing that the state of development of immigrant citizenship education in Iceland actually conforms to the standards that the local government has claimed, i. e. inclusive education for all people, individual approach to every students, and support to immigrants in language studies and social integration.

Accordingly, the interview findings and their discussion also allow answering the research questions presented in the respective section of this paper. Thus, the state of development of immigrants’ citizenship education in Iceland can be generally assessed as positive and promising further improvements. In particular, the interview findings allow saying that immigrants have educational opportunities equal to native citizens in Iceland, and this equality is expressed through the absence of discrimination and overall support to the immigrants that might, without such support, be at disadvantage compared to native Icelanders in respect of language knowledge and overall social integration.

Further on, the interview reveals that immigrants in Iceland can integrate into the local society and still maintain their national and ethnic identity. The point here is that, according to the interviewee, Icelandic society is rather tolerant and friendly, while its customs and traditions are similar to the majority of European countries. However, even if an immigrant desires to manifest his/her origin in his/her native traditions, the society does not discriminate this immigrant on this basis. Drawing from this, the interview findings allow seeing that it is possible to exercise immigrants’ original customs and tradition and be considered a citizen in Iceland. At the same time, family relations and roles do not change significantly for immigrants when they integrate to Icelandic society.

Needless to say, the findings of the current research have their considerable limitations. The ideas and assumptions derived from an interview of one person cannot be treated as the universal truth to make conclusions regarding the educational system of a whole country. The current research only outlined the basic trends observed in Icelandic society, while further research is definitely needed to widen the scope of the study and examine the topic of immigrant citizenship education in Iceland, as well as in any other countries, on larger samples.

Conclusions

So, the conclusion of the current paper is that the state of immigrant citizenship education in Iceland is at the proper stage of development as compared to other countries, in which reputable scholars find considerable issues in this area. Although the rather narrow scope of the research does not allow making any generalizations on the basis of its findings, the value and relevance of the current is obvious. First, the research has managed to examine the topic of immigrant citizenship education in Iceland directly, using evidence by a person that has experienced all the stages of Icelandic education, i. e. the interviewee. Secondly, the research has outlined the direction for further research and grounded the consideration of Iceland where immigrant education is developed better than in the majority of other countries.

References

Banks, J. (2007). Educating citizens in a multicultural society. NY: Teachers College Press.

Gunnlaugsdottir, M. (2008). The situation of modern language learning and teaching in Europe: Iceland. Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.

Mason, H. (2002). The venture imperative: a new model for corporate innovation. Harvard Business Press.

Noddings, N. (2005). Educating citizens for global awareness. NY: Teachers College Press.

Osler, A. (2005). Teachers, human rights and diversity: educating citizens in multicultural societies. Trentham Books.

Stefna, I. (2007). Government Policy on the Integration of Immigrants. Ministry of Social Affairs of Iceland.

UNESCO. (2008). Preparatory Workshop on Inclusive Education Nordic Countries: Iceland. International Bureau of Education.

Wolf, P. (2004). Educating citizens: international perspectives on civic values and school choice. Brookings Institution Press.